


Beyond the Splendour of the Sky

by stellatundra



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 12:38:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17746040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatundra/pseuds/stellatundra
Summary: “Here is the real face of your revolution, Enjolras. Not the angry man but the abandoned woman.”In which Eponine has a problem and Grantaire unexpectedly finds a new purpose in life.Or, Grantaire and Eponine run away together.





	Beyond the Splendour of the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> “I see a shoddy universe, beyond the splendour of the sky.”  
> \- Victor Hugo, _Les Miserables_
> 
> I read the book and decided I needed Grantaire and Eponine to ditch the oblivious men they are besotted with (and who will only get them killed) and run away together (in a purely platonic sense).

Grantaire looked up from the bottle as the young woman sat down in the chair across from him. Being approached by young women was not, despite what he told his friends, a common occurrence in Grantaire’s life. He studied her curiously - filthy hair, ragged blouse, weary expression – and concluded she was probably not here from the wine merchants to collect on an unpaid bill. There was something a little familiar about her, however. He had seen her before, with one of his friends – Marius, of course, unlikely collector of waifs and strays.

“He’s not here,” Grantaire told the girl. “Marius, I mean.” The look she sent him could fairly be described as withering. 

“I know.” Her voice was rough, husky and resigned. She didn’t seem inclined to move. “Don’t see your friends here either, Monsieur.” Grantaire stared at her. 

“They are all plotting to get themselves killed, an activity I have little enthusiasm for, I confess. I find drinking wine infinitely more to my taste. Would you care for some? Drink of Dionysus, curer of ills, loosener of tongues and morals?”

“I doubt it’ll help,” the girl shrugged, taking a swig anyway, “hot gin didn’t.” This last was said in an undertone, almost to herself. 

“So, what is it that ails you, fair comrade?” Grantaire asked. She glared suspiciously, as if unsure whether he was mocking her or not. He would have been hard pressed to say for sure himself.

“I’m going to have a kid,” the girl said, one hand straying to her belly, scarcely swollen at all beneath her rags. She was little more than a kid herself. While her lack of delicacy was refreshing, Grantaire was aware there was usually only two reasons a girl would tell a man she hardly knew about such a condition – either he was a doctor, or the one that had got her in that state to begin with. Grantaire knew decidedly little about medicine, beyond self-medicating, but barely any more about women. The likelihood that he had at any point imbibed enough for a dalliance with this dirty, scowling, decidedly feminine article seemed absurd. 

“Why are you telling me?” he asked at last, at a loss. The girl shrugged.

“Had to tell somebody. Blame your wine, loosener of tongues and all that,” she said with a half-grin that reminded him suddenly and forcefully of the street boy, Gavroche, who often took letters and messages for les Amis at extortionate rates of renumeration. 

“Is it Marius’s?” he asked, prepared to challenge Marius for the honour of this urchin, if only to see the look on his face. The girl looked suddenly pensive, shoulders tight, hunching in on herself. 

“Nah,” she said quickly, somehow both bristling with defensiveness and regretful. “Nah, he would never…” She stopped abruptly. Grantaire wondered about the rest of that sentence - would never be so dishonourable, or would never stoop to lay hands on her in the first place? Something in her expression gave Grantaire the uneasy sense of looking in a mirror, and he seemed to understand it all without words. The pain of being disdained by the one you loved, the shame of having sought comfort elsewhere, the hopeless longing that despite everything refused to fade – he knew them well. He felt a sudden sense of kinship.

“Here,” he said, pushing the plate with the remains of his breakfast towards her. It was a bad breakfast and good wine, so he’d been easily distracted and barely touched the plate. But the girl looked hungry enough not to care, and it was the only gesture he could think of to make in that instant. She didn’t thank him but fell to right away, as if she were afraid that he would take the food back if she didn’t eat fast enough. 

Here, he thought, is the real face of your revolution, Enjolras. Not the angry man but the abandoned woman, poor and dirty and resigned to it. What difference will it make to her if you all get yourselves blown up on some barricade? She’ll live or die in these streets and her brat too, just the same. 

Unless someone were to take care of her. 

Grantaire was struck by the idea, not for its own merits, but for the way it contrasted to Enjolras’s ideal. In itself, would it not be just as much a sacrifice? It went against all that he intended for his life (not that that was much: only to drink, and to die at Enjolras’ feet). To die for the People, for Patria, all those capital letters, was all very noble. But to live for change, to live for a single person from among the People... Well, people had capital letters too, did they not? He, _Grand R_ , knew that well enough. 

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Eponine,” she said, pausing only a moment before resuming shovelling bread into her mouth. Just one name, as most of the Amis were known by. Capital E. It seemed somehow fitting. 

Enjolras could die for France and _Fraternite_ , if he chose. He, Grantaire, would live - for _Egalite_ and Eponine. 

 

*

There was no difficulty about a license or a priest willing to perform a perfunctory ceremony in haste. Eponine looked so much improved with a clean face, shoes and a blue woollen dress that she could have outshone any bride who looked pretty all of the time and added only the refinements of lace on her wedding day. 

Over the events of the wedding night it is always best to draw a veil; suffice it to be told that the happy couple took a coach outside the city and stopped in the first available inn, where the groom drank himself into a stupor and the bride slept blissfully alone on sheets better than those to which she was accustomed. 

Bad habits are not easily broken – he drank, she stole, they argued. But they changed too. There was, of a sort, a courtship between them which began with their sudden marriage and ended in friendship. 

Moralists of the age might have attributed the refinement of Eponine to marriage and motherhood. Grantaire, the cynic, observed that any change in her was brought about by two other concerns: bread and books. With a full belly and a nourished mind, perhaps any hungry-eyed, sharp-tongued street-rat could become a philosopher. 

Grantaire concerned himself less with the political principle, however, and more with the burgeoning understanding that Eponine had a sharp mind and an engaging manner of expressing herself, now that she had the leisure to think of more things than where the next meal was coming from and how to best avoid the blows dealt by life. Grantaire discovered that Eponine could read and write, the first time she threw a book at him.

“This is nonsense,” she declared, curling her lip. “I was bored, so I read it, but it was stupid!” A heated argument over the merits of Rousseau ensued, which Grantaire found he enjoyed immensely.

“Bring me more books,” Eponine half-demanded, half-pleaded and Grantaire complied. Sometimes they were novels, sometimes treatises, even medical pamphlets. Eponine wanted to read, wanted to learn, devoured anything she could lay her hands on, and he found he enjoyed having discussions with her on all that they read. Grantaire would have liked to believe that he was educating her and forming her mind and opinions, but in truth Eponine was quite capable of forming opinions of her own and it was he who found himself revising some of his long-held opinions, especially with regards to the place and limitations of women. 

An admirer of the male form, Grantaire had never truly thought about women except as the servers of wine and the mistresses of his friends. He had cultivated a reputation as a womaniser, knew how to flirt and to pay a compliment, or an insult disguised as a compliment, which was all the more entertaining. He’d given cursory thought to the lot of the poor washerwoman, or grisette, or prostitute, when such a subject arose at a meeting of les Amis. He had never considered the possibility that women could be equal to men in their understanding, and in this he was hardly alone. But he had to admit that he heard as much sense from Eponine as from many a man he had conversed with. 

What struck him most, though, was that her cynicism rivalled even his own, and that he often found himself arguing Enjolras’ part in the arguments on many of their favoured topics, defending the views he had often scorned in the past. 

*

The night when Eponine gave birth was wild and forbidding. The birth pains began in the day, but Eponine knew enough to know it would be some time yet. She’d been old enough to help when her mother had birthed the last two, the little boys who’d been farmed off to someone or other, neither seen nor thought of much again. Towards evening the pains grew sharper and she asked Grantaire to send for the old woman in the town who would help with these things. Grantaire was only too happy to draw a veil over the mysteries of childbirth and would have waited for the woman’s arrival by the fireside if Eponine had not asked him to stay. 

“Only a while,” she said. “I am afraid.”

“The pain will be over by morning,” Grantaire assured her, but felt a fraud in making such assurances. 

“It is not the pain I am afraid of,” she replied, gritting her teeth against the waves of it even so. “I do not know how to be a mother.”

“You had a mother once.”

“No very great example, I assure you.”

“Tell me about them. Your parents.” So she did, in brief, and Grantaire learned of the foibles and crimes of the Thenardiers, their schemes and plots, their cruelties and deprivations. The last time she had seen them, she said, there had been a plot against an old gentleman who’d come to give them charity, disrupted by the arrival of the police.

“And then, they called Montparnasse…” Her face shuttered. 

“Montparnasse?” Grantaire pressed. 

“A man my father knew. A criminal. Handsome. Persistent.”

“Was he… the child’s father?”

“You are the child’s father,” Eponine said firmly, and that was the last time Montparnasse’s name was mentioned by either of them. 

“I do not think I know how to be a father,” Grantaire mused. 

“We can – ah! - learn together. Tell me something,” Eponine begged, clutching at his sleeve. “Tell me something about you.” 

It was a long night, a dark night, a night for secrets to be whispered into like into a confessional, to be set free. 

“I loved someone,” he found himself saying. “Someone who did not love me. Did not take me seriously. But it was the one thing I was ever serious about. He was the one thing…” He faltered. Eponine grasped his hand. 

There was a knock on the door. The old woman had arrived. 

They both loved the child. There is nothing like shared experience, shared love for something, for someone to bind you together. 

And so they lived.

 

*

Decisions have consequences, unknown, unknowable, reaching their fingers out and pulling at the strands of fate. Some things will always be, others can change entirely in the blink of an eye.

There would always be a barricade in that same street, on that same day. And so there was, whether Grantaire and Eponine remained to die upon it or not. 

But Marius received a letter. Gavroche delivered a reply. Jean Prouvaire, as Grantaire’s groomsman, was not there in time to be executed. The barricade was taken, some men died, but more men lived as well. Without Marius, without Valjean, surrender was inevitable. Although Enjolras would have fought to defend it to the death, he too was unsettled, defeated before the fighting was truly over. Unconscious as the barricade fell, not recognised as the ringleader, he was taken up by Javert for affray.

Seven years later, Enjolras was released from prison, head shaved, thin from malnourishment but muscled enough from the work. He was told in no uncertain terms not to return to Paris. Like Valjean before him, Enjolras found himself wandering from town to town, on the receiving end of suspicious looks. But 1839 was not 1815, Enjolras was not so frightening a figure as Jean Valjean. He worked, he bought food, he travelled. He lived, if you could call it living. He had not given up his revolutionary ideals, and even found enough people in each town he passed through to engage in conversation about them, before he was moved on by those who did not share them. His looks were faded and his idealism tempered by hardship, but he retained enough of his natural charm and conviction to hold some fascination for those who wanted to hear him. 

Life is beset by coincidences. It is the notice that we take of them, the way we allow them to form into patterns in our minds, to influence our judgements that gives them their power. Enjolras came into the town of N---, as with any other, seeking work, seeking an inn to break his fast and rest his head. It had been a long road from the last town, and he was weary. He leant only for a moment against the wall, under the shade of an apple tree. If an apple had not hit his head, he might not have looked up. 

“Pardon Monsieur,” called a voice, and a small boy shinned his way down the tree to stand on the wall beside him. The boy held out the apple. “You can have it.” Enjolras was too hungry to have the dignity of refusal. He ate, and regarded the boy, who looked uncommonly like Gavroche, the street boy who had sometimes passed letters among the Amis. It was a striking likeness: freckles, dark curls and lop-sided grin. Only when he found himself holding the stalk did Enjolras realise he had eaten the entire apple. “Cor, you must have been hungry, Monsieur,” said the boy. He could have been anything between five and ten. Enjolras never had been any good at telling the ages of children. “Come home with me if you like, my ma’s making stew.” Enjolras stared at him, this innocent kindness not what he was used to.

“I’m not sure your mother would appreciate you bringing me home,” Enjolras said, his voice rusty from disuse and thirst.

“She won’t mind. It’s good stew, I promise.”

“What’s your name, boy?” Enjolras asked.

“Etienne,” the boy replied. It was his own first name. Perhaps it was this that allowed Enjolras to be swayed, combined with the resemblance to Gavroche. Hands in his pockets, he followed the boy home. The boy chattered all the way, about his father who was a kind of lawyer, or something similar, who read many books, and about his mother’s school for the girls of the town. 

“Etienne! You are late! Have you been stealing apples again? I will ask your papa to beat you!” called a woman’s voice from the kitchen. Enjolras stood in the doorway, cap in hand, unsure of his welcome. 

“Ma!” laughed the boy, standing on tiptoes to kiss her cheek, “Papa never beats me. Besides, we have a guest. Be nice!”

“You are a terror,” said the woman, turning. “Oh,” she said as she saw Enjolras in the doorway. Perhaps it was the sight of the scar on the side of his head, for her voice flooded with pity. “Well now, take a seat, Monsieur, and I’ll get you something to drink.”

There was a conversation in furious whispers between the woman and the boy, but a bowl of stew was placed before him, and a cup of milk. Enjolras bid them thanks but said little else as he devoured the food, the occupants of the cottage watching him curiously. He looked up only as he heard a voice at the door, 

“What, petit-Etienne, no kiss for papa today?” 

At almost the same instant, the man in the doorway looked at him and the blood seemed to drain from his face. A familiar face, in an unfamiliar setting. The papers in his hand fell to the floor with a flutter and scattered across the tiled floor. “Enjolras?” 

“Grantaire!” It was a whispered exclamation. Enjolras could not have said how Grantaire then came to be sitting beside him, but he was. It might have been minutes or hours before either found their voice again, the room silent and empty around them.

“So you are not dead,” Grantaire observed.

“As you see. It came as much as a surprise to me, I assure you. And yet not so much as – it was true then? When Bahorel told me you had gone off to get married I thought it a joke, I must confess. Of all of us, I thought you one of the least likely to abandon the revolution for the sake of love. Marius, certainly; Courfeyrac, perhaps; Jehan –”

“But you are mistaken,” Grantaire interrupted him, eyes bright. “I did not abandon revolution for the sake of love – I abandoned my love for revolution.”

Enjolras shook his head with half a smile. “I see you have not lost your talent for speaking cryptically. I’d missed –”

“Yes?”

Enjolras opened his mouth to speak but could not find words to fill the gap of seven years of absence. He reached across the table and clasped Grantaire’s hand in his.

“My friend,” he said at last. “My dear friend.”


End file.
